Datacenters and their workloads are growing rapidly as cloud computing and Internet services become increasingly popular. A datacenter can have a hierarchical power delivery infrastructure including multiple levels to process highly fluctuating and diverse types of workloads. The workload capacity required to handle the ever-growing workload demands is constrained by a datacenter's power budget. Hence, power consumption is a major factor prohibiting the needed growth because existing datacenters cannot accommodate additional servers without surpassing the power capacity of its existing power infrastructure. The highly fluctuating data traffic and multi-level power infrastructures are two challenges that exacerbate the issues resulting from power limitations, significantly degrading the utilization efficiency of an available power budget.
Accordingly, the power capacity of a datacenter has become one of the most contended resources in datacenter management. Building additional datacenter facilities or new power infrastructures could help alleviate the stress on existing datacenters; however, doing so is costly and time-consuming. Thus, techniques that can efficiently utilize existing power infrastructures while maintaining satisfactory quality of service are needed.